The Ghost Variations

by Kevin Brockmeier

  TWELVE

  A GATHERING

  It was never the houses the ghosts were haunting. All along it was the people. And so, as the people succumbed to the virus, first in flecks and dots and then by the millions, the ghosts abandoned the houses, gathering instead around the sturdy, the solitary, the lucky, the survivors. The world of the dead lay skin to skin with the world of the living. From that nearby kingdom, so still and silent, the ghosts watched the epidemic spread. To them, it seemed like a lake rain, the kind that begins with a few silver pinpricks on the water, then boils up hard, everywhere and all at once, before ending with a flutter of breezeblown drops. Suddenly, in the wake of the storm, the world was lit with sunshine again. The only man alive to see it, though, was a wealthy recluse and neurotic, so beset by the embarrassments of society that he had withdrawn from it entirely. For him every conversation, every transaction, down to the briefest and most businesslike, had become yet another occasion for injury. Those countless social encounters, with their countless tiny cuts—cuts inflicted, cuts received, and the one just as painful to remember as the other. Those smiles preceded by telltale pauses. Those favors both sexual and financial. Those what-do-you-thinks and let-me-borrow-you-for-a-seconds. It had all been too much for him, too freighted with need and misunderstanding, and so years ago, with part of his fortune, he had purchased a small Tahitian island, the most isolated and self-sustaining he could find, free by an accident of geography from the handshakes, sneezes, hugs, and kisses that had spread the virus, and by a quirk of the breezes from the mosquitoes that had incubated it. From his bungalow amid the ferns and coconut palms he let the days and nights go by. He could pass entire months without seeing another human being, and often did. Instead he lay in his hammock, swaying lackadaisically. There were no more jets drawing chalk lines in the sky, no more boats bobbing distantly in the water, and surely, if the man had been paying the right sort of attention, he would have noticed that something was wrong. How could he have guessed, though, that as the numbers of the dead had increased, the space they occupied had contracted? By the time the virus had finished its work, they had settled around him as thick as butter. Against his body, no more than a cell’s distance away, pressed something intangible, inquisitive, endlessly alert. It jockeyed slowly for position. It throbbed against the barriers of his life. A life so much emptier than it used to be, and so much less alone.

  THIRTEEN

  MIRA AMSLER

  “That’s you!” says the man seated next to her. “Congratulations!” and before she quite knows what is happening, the woman with the sheen of moisturizer on her face has been ushered onto the stage. The flash of the cameras creates a blue-and-green nimbus in her eyes. By the time her sight has cleared, someone has handed her a trophy topped with an upside-down silver teardrop, its two fat arms meeting at the center of its belly. Engraved on the plate are the words “Best Newcomer,” and beneath them her name: Mira Amsler. All at once, high in her field of vision, she sees a punch flying at her face. She flinches. But it is only the black grill of the microphone, jutting at her emphatically like the beak of some predatory bird. Flustered, she says, “This is very unexpected. I didn’t prepare a speech. I have to confess, in fact, that I don’t quite understand where I am. As you see, I’m wearing my pajamas right now. Also, my hair is cinched back in a scrunchie. But thank you. Thank you very much. I appreciate it.” Though she intends the remarks sincerely, they must sound like self-effacing humor, for a gust of warming laughter accompanies her as she leaves the stage. A voice declares, “We’ll be back after this short break with more of the Forty-first Annual Spirits’ Choice Awards.” Mira wonders out loud at the announcement: What the what now? The man who congratulated her says, “This? It’s the big night.” “What big night?” Mira asks. “You know. The night. For honoring the most noteworthy recent achievements among the dead and the dying.” “But I’m not dead,” Mira interrupts, and the man says, “Oh, you dear thing you. You didn’t let me finish: among the dead, the dying, or the soon to have died. The awards cover the entire calendar year. It looks as if you’re scheduled to die on—” He pages through his program. “July the seventh.” Mira’s mind is abuzz with questions. The ceremony resumes, though, before she can decide which of them to ask. No sooner does the presenter open his envelope than once again she hears her name, this time for “Best Featured Performer in a Cataclysm or Disaster.” From all the whoops, whistles, and back pats she receives, she gathers that she was the runaway favorite. At the microphone she says, “Is this about my vacation? What’s going to happen? Should I cancel my tickets?” A few minutes later her name is called a third time, for “Funniest Mortal Blooper.” The applause rushes over her like a driving rain. “And boy,” chuckles the emcee, “is this one a doozy. Let’s watch the footage again, shall we?” The lights dim and the clip begins to roll. Mira is already halfway up the stairs, but her legs won’t take her any farther. She halts there, a few steps from the apron of the stage, awaiting the ravages of her next award.

  FOURTEEN

  ELEPHANTS

  A pachydermologist was studying the vocalizations of African elephants. One day, listening to his latest field recordings, he looked up to find that just a few meters beyond the camp’s cluster of canvas tents, where the yellow dirt was stitched to the yellow grass, the entire herd had gathered as if for a performance. He pressed the pause button on his stereo. All at once the elephants bustled with activity, tilting their heads, shouldering each other, and pendulating their trunks and tails. He pressed play and immediately they froze again, training their ears this way and that. How curious, the pachydermologist thought. Over the next hour he repeated the experiment a dozen times, always to the same result. Pause and then play. Pause and then play. Whenever the stereo was operating, the herd silenced itself. As soon as it ceased, they broke their repose. Moreover, he realized, their attention gravitated to a different elephant, or set of elephants, after each playback, depending on which set of rumbles, snorts, and trumpets had emerged from the speakers. How, they seemed to be asking each other, did you do that? Here you are, yet I heard you over there. How can you be calling from two places at once? Even to a bone-born behaviorist such as he, the conclusion was obvious: the members of the herd were capable not only of identifying individual voices—this much was already established science—but of identifying them from recordings. The question then became, were they able to distinguish the original voices, the live voices, from the reproductions? Several weeks of additional observation brought the pachydermologist no closer to an answer. Out of curiosity he devised a test. From his catalogue he retrieved an old recording: the bonding calls of a matriarch who had been killed for her ivory some six months earlier. He concealed the speakers in an area of brush and thorn, then retreated to a safe distance and activated the remote control. The elephants roared excitedly, trampling across the savanna. Every so often they halted to lift their trunks and reposition their ears, their enormous bodies moving as one as they attempted to sound out the matriarch’s hiding place. Even after the calls stopped, the herd continued to search for her. For days her oldest daughter would not eat or drink. She stood on the dry bank of the creek, showering herself woefully with dust. Years later, when asked at a lecture to name his biggest professional regret, the pachydermologist remained too ashamed by this incident to recount it. For the elephants, though, it became the founding tale in a new age of ghost stories. Listen, my children, to a chronicle of wonder and sorrow. The-ghost-who-hid-in-high-grass. The-ghost-who-hissed-like-seven-snakes. The-ghost-who-came-back-and-left-again.

  FIFTEEN

  THE WHITE MARE

  A pet medium, famed for her ability to communicate with dead and missing animals, heard the bells on her front door jingle. A man ducked into the parlor. He was dark and brawny, very somber, and, to her psychic antennae, neither a cat person nor a dog person. Right away this marked him as unusual. Ninety-nine percent of her clients could be picked out immediately
as tremulous or distraught pet owners, who sought her out specifically to make contact with the ghost of a dear lost dog or cat. More unusual still was the hat he wore: a gold circlet, shaped to a dozen points, and weighty enough to leave a red dent on his forehead. In earlier centuries, or on a more regal cranium, one would have called it a crown, yet he wore it, she observed, without embarrassment, and without posturing. She had not yet introduced herself when he declared that he wished to know the whereabouts of a particular horse. “You are worried,” said the pet medium. “That I can see,” and asked him for a description of the animal. Curtly he answered, “White,” as if more than one horse of the color were unimaginable. “Male?” she asked. “Female?” “A mare.” The creature, the man continued, was essential to his duties. To his shame, however, he had released her bridle and she had bolted. Worse yet, she was carrying his bow and quiver in her straps. “Without her my work will be impossible,” he said, “and time is distressingly short.”

  The pet medium put some iron in her spine. She pressed her hands to the table. Of course she would try her best, she announced, but the voices were fickle, the spirits could be diffident, and she was older than she used to be, her powers not so formidable. All of this was patter—a mere show—like the heavy eyeliner she wore, the iridescent scarf. Never once had she failed to find an animal she sought. In fact, with barely a psychic nudge, the location of the man’s horse rang out in her mind like a gong. She had no need to consult her maps. He would recover his animal at the city park, she told him, grazing on the ryegrass near the smaller of the two fountains, though at this time of day, she added, with the Seventh down to one lane for repaving, the trains would be quicker than a taxi. The man fished a few coins from a pouch and said, “I thank you.” Watching him rise from his chair, the pet medium was graced with a thought—that of the many eccentrics who had passed through her door, and the many fools she had counseled, he was the most eccentric, and the least foolish. The room seemed to flatten as he left it. For the next fifteen minutes or so her candles, crystals, and dreamcatchers looked like so many silly gewgaws. Then she heard the hooves tattooing the street, and went to the door, and saw the dark man with his crown and his bow, astride his white horse, spreading pestilence with the drop of each arrow.

  SIXTEEN

  MANY ADDITIONAL ANIMALS

  The pill that could reveal the two animals of which a person was the fusion was an immediate sensation. It worked swiftly, precisely, and painlessly. Just swallow a green-and-yellow capsule with y77 printed on the casing, wait three to four minutes, and you would understand with a decisiveness that foreclosed all questioning that you were a combination of a muskrat and a bison, or a goose and a spider, not only apparently but to the bottom of your character. The knowledge washed through you with the quality of a proclamation, dissolving all at once and categorically into your bloodstream. A woman who discovered herself to be a bobcat and a kite would think yes, of course, here it was—her feline gracefulness, her raptorial shrewdness, the key to her, the why. A man who was an armadillo and a seahorse would realize that the pill explained his oddity, his defendedness, his susceptibility to colds and illnesses, even his secret wish to carry a clutch of children in his belly. The evidence and the verdict were one and the same. It was all so obvious, so logical. People hosted pill parties where the guests tried to speculate, based on intuition and acquaintance, which two animals the capsule would reveal in one another. “She’s a porpoise and a greyhound.” “No, she’s half deer and half gazelle.” “Something wily and dangerous, I’d say, like a hornet and maybe a wolf”—and everyone but the woman in question would be delighted when, despite all their predictions, she was discovered to be a snail and a pelican. Animals, too, were given the pill, often in labs or clinics, where it was determined that, just like people, each of them was a synthesis of two disparate animals. Frequently one of those inner animals turned out to be a human being—though never among the other primates, oddly enough, and a cat was always a cat and a cat. For several years it was common for men and women who shared a particularly desirable inner species to have children with the idea of passing that animal along to the next generation. The normal genetic procedures, however, seemed not to apply. Even two parents who were both, at their core, a horse and a ram might produce one child who was a porcupine and an ant and another who was a rhinoceros and a bear. The science of it was inexplicable. The religion of it, on the other hand, thrived. A belief took hold even among practicing evangelicals that when your life was over you became not a singular human soul but the souls of that pair of animals of whom or by which you had been constituted. Some people imagined such an eternity to be a comfort; others a damnation. The difference lay chiefly in whether they felt themselves to be a hybrid or a chimera—something, in other words, that ought all along to have existed, or something that ought all along not to.

  SEVENTEEN

  BEES

  They are not, strictly speaking, bees. They are bee-shaped: velvety round blurs with a pin at one end. They are bee-sized: as big as a thumb from the tip to the knuckle. And they move like bees, bobbing, darting, looping, and swerving in a dizzy, vacillating dance. But though it is tempting to think of them as bees, they are not bees. They have no wings, for instance; no venom. They fly silently, without buzzing. And while they toil as bees do, working over what one might call their fields, it is neither pollen they gather nor nectar. One additional difference, which should not be overlooked: though they exert themselves like bees, and though they luxuriate like bees, they are not, like bees, alive. They make their home on the periphery between life and death, plying their way along the emptiness of the border—that almost inconceivably thin line where bodies become something other than bodies and time commingles with eternity. There the bees assemble their hives, great lobes of interjoining cells that shake and pulse with their activity. In chains and waves the bees depart from the hives and return. The paths they trace seem partially intentional and partially haphazard, so that it is impossible to tell when they are maintaining their course and when they are altering it, only that, however they select their coordinates, they fix themselves over the recently dead the way real bees do over flowers. They operate, that is to say, with instinct if not with purpose. Unfailingly, as soon as someone begins to flicker through their little boundary world, one of the bees will upend itself and prick at him. That they are harvesting something is plain. Energy. Ghosts. The shadow structures of matter. They carry that something with them, whatever it might be, as they dip from person to person. Then they retreat, fat with it, to their hives. Really that is all there is to this place: the bees, the hives, and a great host of forms passing rapidly out of their humanity. All that remains to be said is this: that the threshold the bees navigate is penetrable from either side, which is to say that people cross over it not only as they die, traveling out of history and into infinity, but also as they are born, traveling out of infinity and into history. The bees, it would seem, cannot distinguish between the first set of forms and the second. If indeed these people are something like flowers, and if the substance the bees collect is something like pollen, one can only wonder who is pollinating whom, and whether it is the living who fertilize the dead or the dead who fertilize the living.

  EIGHTEEN

  A BLIGHT ON THE LANDSCAPE

  It occurred to him that the tens of millions of trees discoloring the landscape were destined to outlive him, and so insulted was he by the realization that he vowed to exterminate as many as he could. By eighteen he had logged the last remaining oak from his family’s farm, by thirty-five he had become the most successful commercial real estate developer in the South, and by sixty-four, when he died, he had razed whole cities’ worth of timber, replacing the hickories, willows, pines, and cottonwoods with shopping centers, parking lots, and office complexes where the only surviving vegetation stood in queerly shaped crooks and triangles, as sparse as the hair under his arms. A more productive life he could not
have imagined. When he woke as a ghost, surrounded by the ghosts of those same tens of millions of trees, his indignation was boundless. The woods seemed neverending, a flickering maze of trunks beneath a riot of dreamlike foliage. Something like a breeze winnowed its way through their branches. Something like the sun glowed behind their leaves. Surely, he thought, this was Hell. A night passed and a day. The man struck out in search of a clearing. But no matter where he went, he found more trees plugging the air. It was many weeks later, and only by chance, that he figured out how to kill them. A simple axe blow of the hand, delivered with just the right focused malevolence, and down they would crash, plunging to the earth in a cataract of bark and twigs. Maybe not Hell, he thought. Maybe Heaven. Tree by tree he worked his way through the forest, until one day, as it was falling, a large maple swung about-face and flattened him. Apparently ghosts could die, because when he woke again he was in a new place—not just a ghost but the ghost of a ghost. The soil was richer here, the air warmer, and all around him were more goddamned trees, assaulting his eyes with their faded browns and greens. These were harder to kill than the others had been, their trunks thicker and frogged with knots. The next time he died, the trees were as small and slender as dandelions, and he was able to mow them down by the thousands. The time after that they were mostly water, and spilled from their outlines with the easiest of pokes. And the time after that they gave him a rash that slowly proved fatal. Finally one day, the ghost of a ghost of a ghost of a ghost, he woke to find that his feet were rooted to the soil. Struggle though he might, he could not free them. Worse were the trees themselves, great mobs of bark and sap that went rushing past him like pedestrians at a street fair. They kept bruising him with their limbs, the horrifying beasts. Cones and nuts bombed down at him from their canopies. Their heavy steps expelled the rank smell of vegetation, yet they seemed unaware of him. If he stayed perfectly still, he thought, perfectly still and silent, if he did not wince or cry out, there was the slimmest of chances that they would not notice him. Knock on wood.